Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 4 Oct 1999 09:03:18 +1000 | From | Brian May <> | Subject | Re: cannot delete directory - why? |
| |
On Sun, Oct 03, 1999 at 03:39:44PM +0200, Guest section DW wrote: > From bam@snoopy.apana.org.au Sun Oct 3 01:07:22 1999 > > I exited the chroot environment and tried to remove the pts directory. > This pts filesystem returned the error "file not found" - is this to > be expected? This file not found error confused rm, which entered an > infinite loop (perhaps I should file a bug report against rm?) > > The first is a kernel bug, the second an rm bug. > Clearly, you already submitted a kernel bug report. I submitted a patch. > It is a good idea also to submit an rm bug report.
I am now wondering if it *is* a bug in rm?
I think the behaviour of rm could be explained as follows (not that I have seen the source code). rm gets a listing of the drectory. It then tries to delete all the files within that directory. When it sees the error "file not found", it gets confused - how could that file not exist, when I only just got its entry? So it assumes that a race condition exists, where another process may have deleted it, and re-reads the directory, hence seeing the same file again.
Perhaps it should really have a limit of how many times it will rescan the same directory? -- Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |